Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The counting of challenged ballots finally got underway yesterday, but the canvassing board only managed to get through 152 of the Franken campaigns challenges, with well over a thousand left to go and maybe more. The counting will resume again at 9 am and the board should finish with the Franken pile today.

At the end of the day yesterday the breakdown of the Franken campaigns challenges was 95 for Coleman (62.5%), 19 for Franken (12.5%) and 38 for other (25%). If these percentages hold Coleman would net 221 votes from the Franken challenges. Applying these percentages to the Coleman challenges is a little trickier, because there is no firm number of Coleman challenges right now.

At this point the Coleman campaign has nothing to gain by reducing its challenges, they are simply playing for time. So, they don't know how many ballots they've challenged, they are possibly adding challenges back and possibly withdrawing more. Using the number of 1000 Coleman challenges as a default and the same vote spit that Coleman is getting in Franken's challenges, Franken would net 500 votes. The difference in those two totals, 279, would give Al Franken a 91 vote margin.

In other recount news the MN Supreme court will hear arguments about whether counties need direction in how to sort improperly rejected absentee ballots (IRAB's) today at 1 pm and the Franken campaign filed suit in Olmsted county over their decision to not count a handful of absentee ballots that supposedly weren't rejected. Some counties are still sorting their rejected absentee ballots and some are schedualed to, while others are waiting for the Supreme Court ruling. At the moment, with 48 of 87 counties reporting, I still project the number of IRAB's to be around 1,150 using the Star Tribunes numbers, which doesn't match up with the almost 1,600 projection coming from the Secretary of State.

The Uptake will be live streaming for those who think five guys discussing penmanship is fun.